Bald Babies

"I thought you'd be bald forever," my mother always said, staring at those photos in despair. That sums it up.

Next to my sisters whose brown and blonde curls spilled over onto their chubby little faces there was me with a bare naked head too lazy to grow a thing until I was two. Though maybe it went inward into my enormous forehead and even now I guard two years worth of curls rotting up there over the brain, fertilizing something.

My feet stuck out from under the pink dress.

The last to arrive, my older sisters gave up their efforts to walk upright and instead crawled behind when I could be bothered to move.

So I've got no character. I haven't made a million or even a mess big enough to be proud of like some people I know, a trail of broken lives behind, unpaid debts, piss on the toilet seat. Even queerness pursued me. Karen made the first move on the Greyhound bus back from Texas, taking my hand, raising one of my fingers to her wet mouth.

Sarko Airbrushed

But not enough. Paris-Match only took out the love handles. If only they'd started at the head.

The previous editor of Paris-Match was reportedly fired for dwelling on the problems in the Sarkozy marriage. Since then the magazine has become an unashamed fan magazine of the President and his wife, Cécilia, in recent months. Its nickname amongFrench journalists is "Pravda-Match".

In its edition of 9 August, the magazine published a photograph of President Sarkozy stripped to the waist while canoeing with his nine-year-old son, Louis. In the Match version of the photograph, M. Sarkozy's silhouette is admirably svelte. In the original Reuters photograph, published by L'Express, M. Sarkozy has a roll of fat around his waist.

Complete article. The Independent

Yippee Stripmining

We never needed the Appalachians anyway.

See Rule to Expand Mountaintop Coal Mining
The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation that would enshrine a technique that involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the debris in valleys. New York Times

Black Days

A couple weeks ago in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer wrote about that blotch on our national soul, our national shame, secret CIA prisons where we hold people outside the law, outside the States and torture them. How far should we go when we think about these things? Is listing the facts enough?

There's "waterboarding, sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation." The whole Clockwork Orange regime.

Is it enough to denounce? To feel bad? Even to hit the streets? Should someone kidnap the Bush girls and give them a taste? Should we do it to ourselves, demonstrate in public what it's like to break and be broken? Write it on our bodies, so to speak?

There's something to the priests that set themselves alight in protest. It's a last resort though. For when things get bad enough. The problem is yesterday was already awful. When will we know it's too much?

Against Nature

It's a crime against nature, but I did it anyway, saving a mangy pigeon from a prolonged and horrible death.

The thing had flown into our sliding glass balcony doors, and dropped to the floor. That's what I think happened, anyway.

I only came after the first thud and the flapping, saw the pigeon shaped smear on the door and made assumptions.

At any rate, it was well and truly stuck, because every time it worked up the energy to fly off the balcony into space, it smashed against the dirty Plexiglass designed to keep toddlers from falling into the noxious schoolyard below.

Three or four times it tried, while I watched, cringing at the sickening thuds. I decided it was a metaphor, our U.S. President Bush getting ready to bomb Iran after his great successes in Iraq, not to mention that jolly vacation destination Afghanistan.

We were on our way out, and I could have left it there, hoping against hope the creature would think to fly up first, and then out, but every time I watched it did the same.

Pigeon feathers were starting to accumulate in the corners, and there was poop on the tile. Each thumping crunch pointed to a new concussion, and even less chance the creature would get itself off without an injury.

I imagined coming back to broken wings and filth. Then what? Somebody had to intervene. So I pulled on a raincoat and gloves, everything but goggles which I would have worn if I'd had some, and went out on the balcony, muttering lies I would have said to a horse, like "Calm down darling, everything's fine, just fine."

I pushed a broom towards it, slipped it under the scared flapping wings, lifted it up, bird too, and watched the fat dirty thing fly away.

Peaches

Peaches are in season here, or they are somewhere, and have appeared at the markets, delicate in their vast boxes beside the apricots.

If the oven worked, I'd make a pie and think of my grandmother dead all these years ago in Kentucky. As it is, Marina will get peaches with bourbon sauce over ice cream, maybe.